"It's my personality to be jittery. It's part of my charm"

Hey gang,

So I haven't written a blog entry in a while. It's because I've been doing this awesome thing called work. Which, for me, ironically, involves reading lots of blog entries.

On a whole, reading marketing blogs is basically like reading cereal boxes while you're eating cereal. Except you don't get the benefit of cereal, so instead of bullshit promises for something you'll get later for giving them your money today (Mail-order secret decoder rings and Pay-to-Join "Monetize your Bloggging" webinars are different heads of the same hydra)AND a sugar high, you get, sorry for you, just the former.

So I read all the previous blog entries on this site. And I realized that the most important contribution I've made to the well-being of anyone stumbling across this (stumbling across not upon)is that I've exposed them for the first time to the greatness that is Macho Man Randy Savage promos.

Listen to it. He spoke like that all the time. And most important, he had absolutely nothing to say. It's professional wrestling buffoonery at it's best. It could be said to be, you know, a metaphor for our times. Why must a man pretend to be that which he is not to elicit a reaction from his peers? Would he not rather that they react to his soul than his sequins.

Hell naw.

Besides, Lex Luger pissed him off, and boy is he going to get it. I mean, he's 1,000,000%. That's a pretty high percent.



(For the benefit of facebookers, check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EK-Mr6KbB8

Also, everyone should be aware that I'm breaking a pretty serious marketing taboo because I'm posting links and videos and stuff for free, just because I, you know, feel like it. That's a serious no-no. I could be kicked off Digg for this. Or you know, forced to post ON Digg, which is immeasurably worse. ;-)*

*The smiley makes it ALL ok.

Novel? What's that? Sorry couldn't hear you...

Well, of course, I didn't wind up writing that novel. I wrote all of three pages, but they're a hella good, well a hella decent, well, they're three WHOLE pages.

In fact, I won't be sheepish, and I'll offer you a bit of it. Prepare to be mired in brilliance, smallfolk:

“Ok, so when you left to get pumpkin seeds, Mr. Bogdonovich was in the apartment.”
“Was? What? Was?” Sophie had been consoling her grandmother, unsure why she had gotten a deceptively calm call to come immediately back home.
“Sophie,” her grandmother said softly, her British accent making her words seem ethereal, “oh Sophie, he’s gone, Sophie.”
“Gone?”
The officer with the notepad looked at her from under the brim of his hat. Rhetorical one word questions weren’t going to help anyone solve anything.
“You’re the granddaughter,” he said.
“Yes. What’s happened.”
“I’m Officer Marroni. Your grandmother called us and said your grandfather’s gone missing. She seems to think,” Marroni turned to Riggs, still kneeling around the broken glass, sweeping some into a plastic bag. “that your grandfather threw himself out the window.”
Sophie shrieked. “What!” Yet she seemed to take some cues from Marroni’s body language. Somehow that wasn’t the big reveal. He cleared his throat. “But there isn’t any body on the street.”
No body? “So he’s not dead, then?”
“We’re not sure what’s going on here, Miss.” Riggs said, standing up. “What we do know is that your grandmother called and reported a suicide. But, there’s no body spla—there’s nothing on the street below, Miss.”
Sophie went to the broken window. The entire east wall of the apartment had been a floor to ceiling window, with a door opening onto a small terrace. It was the best feature of the apartment and the building in general, which was in a low-rent area of Brooklyn. Now there was a giant gash in the window, like something had been thrown threw it. Even the metal window supports were bent back, and broken apart in places.
"There's no furniture missing from the apartment." Officer Riggs said, wiping glass particles from his knees.
"So what did this?"
"We're not sure Miss. We're not actually sure of anything. We know a hysterical old woman called us and said her husband of 60 years threw himself out the window while she was out of the house. Then we get here and find this."

BAM!

I only got just a little bit farther than that. At one point, I added a character that hadn't been in the scene, and suddenly he was narrating in first person. The book was going to go (might eventually go?) in a direction uncomfortable similar to John Foer's Everything is Illuminated

I'm writing a novel

Hi everyone,

I've decided to write a novel. Yes, I know, that puts me at the very back of the line of fellow Hunter College graduates who have valiantly decided to grace the world with their novels. Or Psychology dissertations. If you're really honest with yourself, the world needs one about as much as it needs the other. But that doesn't so much matter. Everyone's got to have a passion, right? Otherwise how in the world do you justify say, philosophy, or astronomy, or say, internet marketing? If those three fields collapsed, we'd have a shortage of exactly three things:

1)Pissed-off upper middle class parents who can't make themselves believe that $40,000 dollars per semester is going towards a degree in "advanced critical thinking"

2)Men in mostly superfluous labcoats naming planets things like Quaoar. They would be immediately replaced with a motley variety of star-naming websites.

3)Twitter.

No one would care.

However, just like it's important to have passions, it's extremely important to do what you're really good at. That is, not what you're supposed to be good at, or that thing you can do sort of begrudgingly for a maximum of eight hours at a time, provided you can spend most of those hours fantasizing about the cute girl you saw that morning and no less than an hour for lunch (your job). No, what I'm talking about is that thing you naturally react to without having to think to much about it. It's that thing you can relax into without thinking too much.

When I watch pro wrestling for example, I know when a spot is going longer than it's supposed to, or why a wrestler missed a move he normally would've hit. This is based on prior experience watching pro wrestling, and is, as you may have guessed, wholly and completely useless to my everyday experience. Look, it's not that I wouldn't want to become a pro wrestler. It's just that my throat would hurt after a while:



But writing is also one of my things. I usually get so bleedin nervous when it's time to do it that I write in short, clipped, bursts in messy handwriting, so to make sure I don't actually have to face what I've done. I'm not sure why I'm like that. Why don't you write a dissertation about it?

Then, as I read Neil Gaiman's blog everyday, I was reminded about NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea of the contest is such: one starts writing on November 1st, and attempts to write 50,000 words by November 30th. Whoever has done so uploads their books to the website and feels extremely satisfied with themselves. The goal of the whole thing is to just write, because, as the website says, most people, left to their own devices, would never actually write the novel.

The contest also suggests that an author tell all his friends about it, since the embarrassment at having to admit his failure will, when all else fails, keep the embattled author from quitting.

So, this, after all, is the point of this whole thing. I'm telling you all so that some of you will tell me,

So where is that novel I heard so much about? You know, the one I had to read a whole pointless blog post about before you got down to the point? You didn't quit did you?

Well, did I?

If I did, it's all your bloody fault. And probably a little bit her fault:



She takes up a lot of my time.

Boris